Dungeon Keeper

after playing games for years I think everyone collects a group of favorites that they regularly replay maybe it's a classic that you think stands high above everything else in the genre or to gain that struck you in the right way at the right time and even acknowledging all of its flaws you can't help but love it in high school a friend and I had a tradition that we would have a head-to-head race through half-life every year in December clearly we were the coolest kids in school and everyone was jealous of our awesome idea I see Deus Ex brought up a lot is something that's commonly reinstalled to play every year I could see Halo being a game like this for the generation slightly younger than mine or ocarina of time I think a person's age has a massive impact on what kind of games they end up liking it's a sad but understandable truth constant improvements in graphics can make going back to older games a jarring experience but it doesn't stop there controls were also worse decades ago limited resolution options can also affect the game outside of graphics with hard to read text that can end up cramping a screen these sorts of things are like trying to read a book from hundreds of years ago it looks like English it sounds like English but you'll be damned if there isn't something in every paragraph that leaves you wondering if it was written by running a different language through Google Translate Dungeon Keeper is one of the games that I used to regularly replay I say one of the games but it's not like I have a carefully curated top ten list of favorites or anything I also said used to replay regularly because around the time that Windows Vista became the standard operating system Dungeon Keeper became unplayable I still have the same discs of the game when it first came out I would install and play through it roughly once a year blazing through the campaign a little faster each time until Vista brought compatibility issues and prevented me from playing it for years like a junkie that had developed an allergy to his vice I would search Google every few months looking for some sort of workaround not really believing that I would ever find one as I did and that the game would be dead forever some of you might be thinking that this is leading to the glorious discovery that is good old games and how they've resurrected many old titles like Dungeon Keeper since the site first went live in 2008 they do have the game available on the website but I actually managed to play it again a while before good ol games got their hands on it keeper FX is a fan project to remake the entire game normally this sort of thing ends in disaster but this particular case is different in that the base game was taken as a foundation and parts of it are being changed piecemeal instead of having the whole game addressed at once put another way the project is playable faithful to the original because it is the original and is closer to a version of the game made better like say the unofficial patch mods that you can get for Skyrim and other Bethesda games I'm not smart enough to understand how the guy behind keeper FX is doing all of this all I know is that I was able to play the game again on new operating systems you also need the files from the disk or the good old game release in order to use Keeper FX so it's not a pirated version either if you've played the GOG version it still might be worth it the check FX out I only tried the good old games version once and after seeing how poorly it ran through Doc's box I was even more relieved that the FX version was still around maybe good old games has fixed this by now I'm not sure Dungeon Keeper was developed by bullfrog and released in 1997 with the tagline evil is good there have been games that present players and moral choices or have you playing as an antihero but Dungeon Keeper was the first game that I came across it has you unabashedly playing as the bad guys the game doesn't pull any punches with this you're not some secret agent pretending to be evil to take down the underworld from the inside nor are you the lesser of evil options and out to make the world a better place the game lets you kill torture and conquer and reward you with a monologue after every level that glorifies your wickedness the streets run with the blood of the slain screams of pain and howls of anguish rip the night air like a vengeful siren song this really is some way you can take the kids for a weekend this is all done with dark humor and while it is true the game doesn't take itself super seriously it is definitely faithful to its tagline this was incredibly refreshing upon release I'm sure there will one day be someone in the comment section that will say that another game released in the 80s that you plays the evil side way before this and that how could I not possibly know about it but to me Dungeon Keeper was the first game that let you be the bad guys it's also a game that has a title as literal as can of soup what do you do in Dungeon Keeper well you keep a dungeon multiple dungeons actually there are 20 levels in the campaign each represented by a chunk of land on the map screen everything starts off nice and tranquil and then it's bloodied and pillaged after you're done with it the levels also scale the same way the first you are really easy but the challenge ramps up toward the end the game doesn't have a tutorial and instead uses the first few levels as a way of teaching the player although they often resort to explaining things through pop-up messages before get into the meat of this video I want to give a warning I think this game is really really good so good in fact that I want you to stop watching this if you haven't played it it's about five bucks on good old games and if you can stomach the visuals on the screen right now then I strongly advise that you play it yourself before I ruin the whole thing keeper FX is reasonably easy to set up and I would stress that it's essential in order to enjoy the game if you have trouble getting it working you can even ask in the comment section below and I'll tell you how I got it running let's start out as simply as the game does every level is underground you have your dungeon heart which is effectively the life bar of your dungeon if it dies then so do you and you need to restart the level you start with a literal handful of M's that you can give orders to by selecting what tiles of rock that you want to be excavated the Imps will then work at these tasks and create tunnels to connect parts of the map or clear an area so you can place a room in it you can tunnel toward gold deposits that your m soul mine and then collect put in a treasure room once in this treasure room you are able to spend it on creating more rooms there's almost always a portal near your dungeon heart and once cleaned is from there the creatures will enter your dungeon and become minions creatures have needs that can only be provided by certain rooms a lair is needed for them to sleep a hatchery for them to eat something in another room for them to work in warlocks need a library in some cases that type of creature won't show up to your dungeon at all until you have the room that they want or won't join you until your room is large enough to meet their minimum requirements dragons want a huge treasure room for instance the first ten levels are so introduced in your room type in a new creature or two that goes along with them with only one exception the newly introduced rooms are never directly tied to being able to win a level with the difficulty steadily increasing the new additions to your dungeon feel like new toys to play with rather than mechanics that are still being introduced in a never-ending tutorial despite all of these different rooms the management side of dungeon keeper isn't as complex as many other games released by bullfrog that's fine however because the game has more going on than just keeping your creatures happy and having enough gold to pay them it is pretty good the beauty of Dungeon keepers gameplay is in how simple and intuitively it strings interconnected methods of progress let's go to the ninth level in the game as an example moon brush wetly so right off the bat you have your dungeon heart and starter pack of imps you see your portal behind the wall and that there's some gold nearby the first thing most players will do is start coming for some of that cash in and check the levels map if there could ever be an argument against the fog of war mechanics writes in so many games de dungeon keeper is it I'm supportive of the idea that the player can't see an area without having lined the side of it but having a blacked-out map as an outline of the entire level at the start works so well to get the player wondering about what's out there and provides some much-needed direction to spark their curiosity so let's look at all of this we haven't even built a single room or claimed our portal yet and already we're planning our first few tasks get some gold and some creatures and then work our way around to the more interesting parts of the map what are those gold question marks what's in that winding path to the left there there's a locked door across from the portal that's impossible to block off if we clear the rock around it what's behind that we're less than a minute into the level and already the game has given us both short-term and long-term goals and these are only things specific to this level and it was all done without having an npc or a message pop up to tell us what to do because the regular mechanics found in this game that all fuse together into the fund that is keeping your dungeon also a dear to this idea of having the player build themselves in multiple ways at once from the moment you first strike the rock around your dungeon heart you are settled on the path of building your base first to get some gold then to get a room to hoard your treasure and then new room from there to give your meetings a place to sleep and then a place to eat and train so they can get stronger all the while you're digging out more gold and stock finally more money then you build a library and a workshop and you have new spells rooms and traps being discovered all of the time your gold count is still rising you do some exploratory mining to the next big gold vein that's already visible on the map as a breadcrumb for where to go next your dungeon continues to grow do all the while your creatures are leveling up and you are amassing more and more resources everything in the level can be conquered everything can be taken enemy units you can capture them instead of killing them torture them until they join your side or let them rot in prison and starve themselves and skeletons that can fight for you to capture more people and make more skeletons later on even death won't save the enemies from being consumed by your dungeon because corpses can be taken to the Graveyard and become vampires dungeon keeper lets you build and run your own engine of evil you corrupt the very earth in each level you spread through it all like a tumor growing stronger with every bit of it that you claim it's the same sort of stain that you see left on the world map after you've beaten each realm this gameplay style of a consuming engine isn't the only way to play Dungeon Keeper offers a surprising amount of different ways to tackle each level although I do doubt that all of them were intentional the most prime example of another dominant strategy is to turtle up throughout the entire campaign there are a few times that this can't work but there exceptions to the rule when your imps have no other jobs they will run around and fortify any of the walls that are connected to the land you have claimed or if you want them to do it sooner than that you can pick them up and drop them to force the drop on them these walls then become unbreakable and not some sort of pseudo unbreakable that makes them difficult to knock down they are literally unbreakable until you decide to knock down there's a spell in the game that couldn't do this fortification but I've never seen the enemy cast that gold is usually a limited resource but you can manufacture things in your workshop for free and then sell them I think this is a mostly unintended method of generating infinite money turtling up like this changes the game significantly and instead of having to Train creatures to high levels in order to fight enemy keepers and heroes before they reach your dungeon the game instead becomes about tunnelling quickly to specific points in the map and putting up walls to forever block the enemies out then you can take as much time as you want to create your perfect dungeon and get minions up to max level that can stomp all over the opposition plainly this is conceptually like a building boil of evil that eventually explodes into a murderous rampage training creatures like this can take time and is done so passively as long as you have gold any creature can be made to gain experience in the training room up to a maximum level of 10 you can speed up time in the game to make this go by faster it's one of the best things you can do when you're going full Turtle mode combat is arguably the weakest part of the game and devolves into who has the better army of minions both in type and level some creatures are vastly more powerful than others most of these are embodiments of the rooms that are needed to attract them the bio demon needs a massive hatchery the mistress needs a torture chamber the militant or cleanse a barracks the mistress and vampire are particularly powerful with hard-hitting ranged attacks that can churn through enemy groups but the games were about the dungeon building and acquiring power rather than commanding the unit's themselves I always thought it was a commentary on how the evil overlord can never really rely on his minions to do the right thing you can pick them up and drop them on clean territory and you can nudge them in the right direction with spells that you can't issue commands directly sometimes it can feel like you're wrestling with a limited AI that your minions has but as I just said I wonder if that was intentional the one exception to this rule is the possession spell I would guess that the Horned Reaper is probably the most iconic thing that ever came out of the game but the possession ability is the one that always stuck in my mind okay that I swear that was so now you can assume control of any minion be it a vile demon or imp and the game becomes a first-person shooter you can run around the dungeon and see it from your minions perspective you can use their abilities and force them to move to places that they otherwise wouldn't this is a truly brilliant game mechanic and I wish other games had it even if it was only to see things from a different viewpoint I think it could be awesome in RTS games Starcraft 2 especially or maybe even seeing your city through the eyes of a citizen in anno 2070 possessing a minion is one of the many ways that you can break Dungeon Keeper maybe this is my own bias showing and how much I love the game after playing it so many times since I was a kid but I think bullfrog understood how much fun it can be to destroy a game in this way there are a lot of cases that push the game closer to the sandbox that allow the player to choose how easy or difficult they want to make it on themselves the amount of space you're given for each dungeon is the most clear example of this you can create these huge sprawling monstrosity x' on almost every map or you can choose to play quickly and rush down your opponent some levels have secret power-ups these range from granting your free level to all of your creatures to revealing a hidden level and then to transferring an existing creature to the next level after you're done a minion that keeps all of the experience it already gained sometimes you can find these on several levels in a row so you can keep sending that level 10 power house and then possessing it right at the start and walking into the enemy dungeon or winning before they have a chance of ever fighting back the game can become very easy if you play it like this but I think this is unlikely to happen on your first playthrough and so it becomes some sort of guilty pleasure slash reward for players curious enough to see what they can get away with this can flip to the other side too and you can enforce limitations on yourself how far through the campaign can you get without ever using a training room or ever using magic how about throwing back every creature you get into the portal except for trolls and now you have to beat every level with traps and doors only or how about you're not allowed to throw any creatures back at all and whatever random selection the portal deals you is what you have to work with for this level my personal favorite is to try and beat the game without ever claiming the portal on the levels that you don't automatically start with one gives to get really creative and use your knowledge of hidden areas to know where neutral creatures already exists in the world and use them to get started this also makes you a de facto undead keeper that relies on a massive your army by whittling away what you can for vampire corpses and skeletons there are also so many little D tails that add to the game how creatures dangle in your hand when you pick them up how chickens will explode when you claim an enemy hatchery certain creature types are natural enemies spiders and flies skeletons and vile demons vampires and warlocks for some strange reason there are unique animations for almost every type of creature when it is put in the torture chamber skeletons are getting the ribs bashed in dragons are getting your wings carved like their giant turkeys the end result is a game with multiple ways to play even if the final goal is always the same new rooms and creatures add twists between levels but toward the end it's the difficulty that keeps it all engaging topped off with a bullfrog Tron that the developer was known for anyway if you never played the game and you still got this far then hopefully I didn't spoil too much of it they may look basic but I urge you to give it a chance the game had a sequel that may be more visually appealing if that's what's putting you off I think that the original is by far the superior game but Dungeon Keeper 2 does have its own good moments I will go into detail on it because it'll be a future video along with the recently released spiritual successor war for the overworld I haven't played the game yet since it had a bad transition out of early access but I've heard that it's in a good state now and I look forward to trying it soon so yeah that's Dungeon Keeper so why does the video still have a few minutes left on the timer even if you're a fan of the game who just watched this video for a trip down nostalgia Lane you might not know that there are fan made campaigns for Dungeon Keeper in the official expansion from bullfrog the deeper dungeons the levels are an extreme ramp up in difficulty some of them adopt ideas of optional challenges that I just mentioned one of the harder ones has you stuck with a tiny little hatchery and no way to enlarge it others are still difficult but well on the tedious side of things with massive hero fortresses and a lot of magic doors that end up testing your patience more than anything else some of the fan-made campaigns are like this it may seem a little unorthodox to talk about an unofficial content but sometimes mods can add so much to a game there's one for Skyrim called interesting NPCs that is so good and so well and seamlessly integrated to the game that when I think of Skyrim I consider that mod to be Canon the ancient keeper campaign is one of many that comes bundled with keeper FX and is one of the most interesting unique and engrossing experiences I have ever had in any game let's have another warning here if you love Dungeon Keeper and you haven't played a Ching keeper then you might want to consider stopping this video and checking it out before you go I will stress that it is a very different animal than the original campaign and is definitely not for everyone if you're curious but not sold on it yet you might want to stick around to hear more before deciding to give it a try the Geico mediation keeper posted often on the unfortunately named keeper clan forums his name there is dragons lover and your reaction to that name is a good test to whether or not you've spent too much time of your life on the Internet we should be grateful there's no apostrophe in the name at least let's just hope he thinks dragons are cool I don't know this person and I've never interacted with him in any way the only reason I know his name is from googling about the campaign he made what I find so wonderfully fascinating about any keeper is that so much thought when it's a creative ways to make it brutally punishingly difficult while still working with the constraints of the original game nothing new was added no new creatures or skills or map types or anything it's nothing but inspired ways of altering the base game in a way that makes it play like something completely different there are two main ways that ancient keeper succeeds first is that it realizes that building up a massive dungeon and letting your minions level up for a big showdown while fun can be tedious if that's the only way a player is challenged like some of the best levels from deeper dungeons what happens instead is that there are huge obstacles put in the players way before you can get to the stage where you can turtle up in and mash your forces so on the very first level a veritable lake of level 10 Archer stands in the way of you and the only portal in this realm and all you have are a bunch of in a library and a warlock to figure out how to get past them and start getting creatures the second way to test the players on your knowledge of the game and this is where I think the campaign has its moments of pure brilliance on some levels you get hints through the developer message system and I will admit some of these are too obscure and hard to figure out but it turns Dungeon Keeper into something closer to a puzzle game one level blocks you from getting a training room you have the level up inventive dragons in order to take over the realm but well how they're stuck on level 1 and all the enemies are level 10 you explore the pre-made dungeon given to you and there's a high level hero in one of the rooms trapped on a single tile in the middle of lava that's your training room and the player is left to figure out how to use it returning to the first level the best way to get to the portal is to track the archers in the water after you breach through the wall to get there the temple and guard post rooms are both raised when you place them on the ground so if you put them on tiles next to the water the raised part of it is too high for characters to climb up and over it this allows you to build a bridge safely to the portal through placing it down and then selling parts of it and then using the disease spell learned by the warlock in the library in order to clear the archers and get your portal the level then teaches you how to use a workshop to make doors and then sell them to generate gold forever something that you'll be doing often throughout the campaign ancient keeper is by no means perfect and sometimes the things that asks of you are beyond what a player could reasonably figure out on their own not to mention that the updates to keep rfx maybe one day break ancient keeper completely but it's so unique that I can't help but love it some levels even incorporate well known bugs as solutions or have sections where you need to use the possession spell and navigate dangers there are some tedious parts with similar huge fortresses found in the deeper dungeon levels but I still recommend trying it out if you want an ultra hard twist on a game that you love years ago at the very least it's an exploration of what can be done when someone who's restricted by the game it needs to push the currently existing mechanics to their creative limit without having the option to add new things as an alternative it makes me wonder how some other games could benefit from this kind of intense creativity for optional content so that's Dungeon Keeper we're ending for reals now hopefully people enjoy these looks of older games intermingled with newer ones if not well I do plan on reviewing war for the overworld at some point my hope is that it adds new ideas that complement what made dungeon keeper so great I think that a lot of old games are surprisingly complex when you go back and play them and it seems to me that many games today are simple concepts with a fresher coat of paint and a better user interface games like Dwarf Fortress can be the complete antithesis of this of course but I think a healthy balance could be struck that could make a dungeon keeper game vastly better than the original thank you for watching let me know in the comments section what you think and I'm supposed to beg for likes and subscribers on it so yeah if you can do that go ahead thanks

Channel: Joseph Anderson

Views: 247,701

Rating: 4.9590893 out of 5

Keywords: Video Game (Industry), Dungeon Keeper (Video Game), War For The Overworld (Video Game), video game analysis, video game critque, video game review, retro game, old pc game, Peter Molyneux (Video Game Developer), classic games

Id: 1uGy_6BQetg

Length: 19min 27sec (1167 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 12 2015